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Thursday, October 29, 2015

NOAA refuses to comply with House subpoena for documents on climate

It shouldn't surprise us that the NOAA refuses to release data on how they reached the conclusion that the earth was, indeed, warming. It is the only study showing an increase in temps over the last 15 years, thus any debunking would be injurious to the climate change cause.
Aside from the shocking arrogance in defying a subpoena from Congress, it's pretty obvious that the NOAA doesn't want to release the data because it will either show they cooked the books, or, as they've done in the past, misinterpreted the data. Smith can go to court, but by the time the issue is adjudicated, the next Congress will be sitting.

Three takeaways from the latest GOP presidential debate

Even though the CNBC GOP debate was something of a trainwreck â€“ thanks to the the childish combativeness of the moderators â€“ it was probably the best debate yet because it was so close to how the general election is going to go.
Other people will get different things out of this, but my three big takeaways were...1. You would have to be either a moron or a liar to deny a media bias against conservatives. Marco Rubio's youth, missed voting record, and personal finances all were brought up in this debate.
These duplicitous jerks weren't calling Barack Obama a "young man in a hurry" when he was running in 2008, he was 46 years old (only 2 years older than Rubio is now), he was only half-way through his first/only term in the Senate (Rubio is near the end of his term) and he missed more than twice as many votes percentage wise during his run than Rubio has thus far.
If that isn't bias then these memes aren't really satire. Even Think Progress knows CNBC screwed this pooch.2. This election may be a game changer for how the GOP starts to handle a media that is hostile to it. These candidates (the ones that mattered at least) didn't take any crap from the moderators, who were the real opponents last night. Terrible and false premises were rejected, the candidates asserted themselves over their efforts to move on from important fiscal issues to...marijuana and *cough* fantasy football...which did not last long after being ridiculed for it. Even the audience at times let the moderators know what kind of asshats they were being.3. Liberalism is totally intellectually bankrupt, and it's getting harder to hide it. This isn't a new revelation by any means, but if people are consuming these debates, and remembering and processing them over time then they would see this immutable truth. The pathetically weak-kneed performance of the moderators in the Democratic debate was summed up not only by the softballs they tossed at Hillary, but the few times she was "challenged" Anderson Cooper started the challenge "with all due respect." Those four words were never uttered to the other Dem candidates much less anyone on the GOP side.
That attitude isn't just one that is withering for an exchange of ideas or for the ability for a campaign to be sharpened, it's indicative how totally bereft of intelligent thought the left is in the first place. Ted Cruz NAILED them on it too:

"This is not a cage match. And you look at the questions -- Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don't you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues," Cruz said to commanding applause from the audience.

Then, Carl Quintanilla got booed for asking Ben Carson if he lacks judgment when other people use his likeness without his permission.
That liberals who lead major televised events think these are mic-drop questions that would "destroy" people who are clearly much smarter than they are, when precisely the opposite occurs, and they keep trying to do it to do it, proves how dumb they truly are.

War on Cops: Even as violent crime spreads like wildfire across U.S. cities, President Obama advises police to "de-escalate" encounters with suspects and find "alternatives to arrest." Spoken like a man with a protective detail. Not to mention a radical agenda impervious to reality.

On Tuesday, the president spoke to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago. There, he and his attorney general handed out a guidebook published by his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The 30-page guide, titled "Moving from Recommendations to Action," is designed to help local police departments implement his "criminal justice reforms." Under the section...

This Is Not a Drill. Ted Cruz Is Well Positioned in the GOP Presidential Race!

Anyone who predicted last spring that donors to Texas Senator Ted Cruz's then-nascent presidential campaign were setting their money on fire is probably feeling pretty foolish right about now. Yep, that was a boneheaded move right there. In the six-plus months between Cruz's presidential announcement at Liberty University and Wednesday night's third GOP presidential debate, his campaign has been both adeptly run and increasingly lucky. About 90 days out from the February 1 Iowa caucuses, Texas' junior senator is looking good. Well, not him so much, but his campaign.
This week, especially, has been fun for Cruz. Monday, he picked up the endorsement of Texas' most powerful elected official, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, joining forces with someone who supported one of Cruz's opponents during Cruz's 2012 Senate campaign.
"Senator Cruz is the prescription for what ails the Republican Party and this country," Patrick said. "This country has been in malaise for eight years. Our party has been asleep for more than eight years."(continued)

Agency won’t give GOP internal docs on climate research!

The federal governmentâ€™s chief climate research agency is refusing to give House Republicans the detailed information they want on a controversial study on climate change.
Citing confidentiality concerns and the integrity of the scientific process, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it wonâ€™t give Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) the research documents he subpoenaed.
At the center of the controversy is a study that concluded there has not been a 15-year â€œpauseâ€ in global warming. Some NOAA scientists contributed to the report.
Skeptics of climate change, including Smith, have cited the pause to insist that increased greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are not heating up the globe.
Smith, the chairman of the House Science Committee, vehemently disagreed with the studyâ€™s findings. He issued a subpoena for communications among the scientists and some data, leading to charges from Democrats that he was trying to intimidate the researchers.
Late Tuesday, NOAA provided Smith with some more information about its methods and data but refused to give Smith everything he wanted.
NOAA spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton said the internal communications are confidential and not related to what Smith is trying to find out.
â€œWe have provided data, all of which is publicly available online, supporting scientific research, and multiple in-person briefings,â€ she said. . .

CNBC moderators, press crushed by the Boulder debate!

If the Republican presidential candidates at CNBC's Wednesday debate had to pick the event's biggest loser, it would probably be the news media.

In answer after answer, the candidates targeted the news media, often CNBC itself, for asking what they considered to be hostile questions and making unfair criticisms.

It climaxed with Ted Cruz taking a question about the debt ceiling and using the full length of his allotted response time to bash the three moderators of the debate. "The questions that you've asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Cruz said to thundering applause from the audience.
He then accused moderators of focusing only on the negatives, like Sen. Marco Rubio's skipped Senate votes and Jeb Bush's falling poll numbers, and accused them of trying to quiz Ben Carson on his tax plan to see if he can "do math."

"This is not a cage match and you look at the questions: Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain?" Cruz said. "Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don't you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?"

The audience roared with approval.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was asked to respond to a newspaper from his home state that called on him to resign from the Senate over missed votes in Congress, he said it was proof of a "double standard" in the mainstream press.

"[I]n 2004, John Kerry ran for president, missing close to 60-70 percent of his votes. I don't recall â€” in fact, the Sun-Sentinel endorsed him," Rubio said.

Later, Rubio said the "mainstream media" acts as "the ultimate Super PAC" for Democrats.

The audience didn't seem warm to the moderators either, and booed the several times over various questions, including one about Ben Carson's "judgement."

"See, they know," Carson said, turning the jeers to laughter and applause.

At one point, the moderators changed the subject to fantasy sports gambling, which is unregulated by the government. Chris Christie shamed them by belting out, "We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we're talking about fantasy football?"

The attack on the news media seemed to go from start to finish. Each of the candidates were given 30 seconds to offer a closing statement at the end of the debate, and Mike Huckabee began his with a final jab.

"I know to a lot of people in the media this is just a big game and we're the players," he said.

On social media, reaction to the CNBC moderators was also strong.

"Boy, CNBC moderators are having a woeful night," Geoff Skelly, a staffer at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said on Twitter. "Not saying it's easy, but they're going to get it for this."

"The CNBC debate isn't a debate," tweeted Politico reporter Marc Caputo. "It's a dull public interview being conducted between moderators and candidates. Let the candidtaes debate."

Debate 3: Ted Cruz Changes the Game

There was a disturbance in the force last night at CNBC's Republican debate, and it left no doubt of who won and who lost. The loser was CNBC, and the winners were all ten Republican candidates â€“ in varying degrees, of course. (More on that later). And there is no doubt when this shift in the axis happened.

Everything changed when Ted Cruz dressed down Carl Quintenilla and John Harwood â€“ two of CNBC's far-left commentators â€“ and literally mocked their absurd line of questioning.

Cruz did not just criticize the questions; he made sport of them. He demonstrated just how infantile most of the CNBC crew was (Tea Party originator Rick Santelli not included). Cruz flat-out embarrassed them, and they knew it.

After the crowd stopped roaring in approval of Cruz's protest, which took a while, the rest of the Republicans followed the Texas senator's lead, and there was almost no Republican-on-Republican crime after this exchange. In fact, we then saw numerous examples where Republicans made it clear that any of the ten on the stage would be far preferable to what we have now, and to Hillary Clinton. These comments were met with loud approval from the audience every time. Meanwhile, Quintenilla was literally booed loudly three times.

Later in the night, Chris Christie embarrassed the mods again with his fantasy football reply, as did Mike Huckabee by turning a gotcha question related to Donald Trump into praise of Trump. I have my problems with Christie and Huck overall, but both are demonstrably nimble on their feet.

And because these precious egotistical and not very bright media mavens crave the love of the audience, I submit that this dynamic will go farther than just recasting the last hour or so of this debate.

CNBC Disaster Debate: Full Republican Debate Grades

In what had to rank as the worst presidential debate in modern history, CNBC anchors berated, cut off, and skewed the words of Republican candidates over the course of two hours on Wednesday night. In spite of – and in the case of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie, among othe

Without further ado, here are the debate grades.

Donald Trump: B. In the run-up to the debate, I wrote that Trump needed to stay away from attacking other candidates. Except when attacked, he did so. His initial exchange with aggressively nasty John Kasich ended with Kasich face down in the dust after Trump questioned his relationship with Lehman Brothers. And his slaps at the media were comic gold – his final riposte against the CNBC powers-that-be, in which he bragged about forcing them to reduce the length of the debate to two hours, was a classic. Trump only gets a B rather than an A because he was caught red-handed in a lie about his position on H1B visas. It became clear that Trump has not even read his immigration plan – or that if he did, he didn’t know it well enough for a debate.

Ben Carson: C. Carson came in with momentum, and he exits without it. He didn’t have much to say throughout the debate, and he flubbed his answers on his tax plan. He looked uncertain and erratic. He still gets off the occasional strong note – when talking about social issues, he may be the best in the field – but even he acknowledged that his weakness may be his inability to consider himself a presidential candidate.

Marco Rubio: A. Rubio had a terrific night. Smooth on defense, willing to jab at the media, Rubio turned in a stellar performance. Labeling the media the Democratic Party’s Super PAC was a terrific moment, a moment underscored by Hillary’s lackeys attacking him throughout the debate with discredited talking point after discredited talking point. John Harwood, the worst offender, even lied about Rubio’s tax plan statistics, forcing Rubio to give him a lecture on elementary mathematics. Rubio also beat up Jeb Bush after Bush turned on him regarding his voting record in the Senate, bashing Bush for hypocrisy: he pointed out, correctly, that Bush had not criticized John McCain for missing votes in 2008, and chided him for political aggressiveness in the face of impending electoral doom.

Ted Cruz: A. Cruz had the best moment of the night, and of the entire debate season. Cruz said that the questions asked “illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.” He added, “This is not a cage match.” He then called the Democratic debate a debate between Bolsheviks and Menshiviks, and contrasted the media treatment of Republicans with media treatment of Democrats, “where every fawning question from the media was which of you is more handsome and wise.” Cruz also pointed out that none of the members of the media vote in Republican primaries. Cruz needed to get aggressive after two passive debates, and he did so in a massive way, with a moment that rated 98% with Frank Luntz’s focus group, for whatever that’s worth. Cruz is for real, and he and Rubio are the shadow frontrunners.

Jeb Bush: F. Bush was plain awful. He couldn’t dent Rubio. He couldn’t dent Trump. He appeared alternatively bewildered and angry. He sided with the members of the media rather than doing the right thing and tearing them apart, like the other more intelligent candidates. He’s toast. Rubio had the unkindest cut of all: his campaign manager said he wouldn’t critique Bush’s performance because it spoke for itself. Ouch.

Carly Fiorina: B. Fiorina was polished, composed, and often witty. But she couldn’t top her second debate performance. There was no place to go but down.

Rand Paul: D. Paul said nothing of interest the entire debate, but vowed to filibuster the new budget deal. That didn’t even land with the heavily conservative audience. It will do little for him in polling.

Mike Huckabee: C. Huckabee’s always fine in debate, and he landed a couple of solid lines against the media as well. But his star has waned, and his economic populism with regard to income inequality made him seem oddly dissonant in the more free market crowd.

Chris Christie: B. Christie has a feel for the room. He understands the mood. He bashed the media – telling John Harwood that he was rude, even by New Jersey standards, was terrific. He also scored solidly on entitlement reform, and appeared magnanimous with his colleagues. A good night for the New Jersey governor.

John Kasich: F. Shouty McScreamypants came out in full force, with Kasich leading off the debate by calling his colleagues insane, and concluding by saying Americans should come together. It was that kind of night for the incoherent big government governor of Ohio. Truthfully, Trump put his candidacy six feet under in the first five minutes of the debate.

CNBC: Z. There are no letter grades that properly fit how terrible the network was. The network was so awful that even Reince Priebus had to condemn them.

The field is consolidating. The top three, in the end, will be Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. Christie is the new dark horse. Jeb is done. The race is on.